Sometime in 2007, fellow Biblioasis writer Mike Barnes sent me, in
manuscript, an essay he’d just written called “Two Rooms”, asking for my
response. From the first paragraph, I found it electrifying, astonishing,
and (remarkably) strangely beautiful despite its harrowing subject matter. It
described his hospitalization, in his early twenties, following a bizarre
self-mutilation, and what came after: misdiagnosis, two years of failed drug
trials, electroshock treatments, a staff meeting that nearly saw him
transferred to a long term care facility; then months of near-coma resulting
from a prescription dosage error. “Two Rooms” was the genesis of The Lily Pond: A Memoir of Madness, Memory, Myth and Metamorphosis(Biblioasis,
2008), a series of four interlocking personal essays that probe the impact of
mental illness on a life over a period of thirty years.
The
Lily Pond is a one-of-a-kind book. It is so much more than a
book about mental illness; it could hardly be further from a self-help book or
a popular-style “recovery memoir”. There is not a buzz-word to be found in it,
not a single stereotype or oversimplification, not a second’s pandering to the
voyeuristic impulse of a public hungry for sensational true stories. No
sermonizing, no self-congratulation. Instead, with humbling honesty, and
bringing a formidable intelligence to bear on the subject, Barnes gives us a
rare inside look at mental illness and its treatments, interweaving
autobiography with reflections on paintings, literary works, myth, metaphor,
and scientific lore. His interest is in the psyche’s resources for
healing and in the universals of the human condition as filtered through the
particulars of his life experience. His book is, perhaps more than
anything, a work of philosophy and a testament to human resilience and
creativity.
One
of the things I love in The Lily Pond is the voice in which
the essays unfold: measured and sober, meditative, freeassociative, often
mesmerizing, yet enlivened by unexpected turns of the imagination (think Oliver
Sacks, think W. G. Sebald.) It’s a book that digs deep and wakens
wonder – a deep-sea dive of a book, able to pull me in again and again to
surface each time with an enriched appreciation of the things that matter in
life.
Over at Douglas Glover's online web-magazine Numero Cinq Thirsty readers can find a new full-length work from Mike Barnes, a novella -- though I don't think this word fully captures what is up there: part memoir, part fiction, part philosophical and psychological disquisition, part ... -- called Ideas of Reference. A powerful, surreal shotgunned kaleidoscope, dealing with madness and memory, leaping off into areas the Lily Pond only explored peripherally. Anyone who read and enjoyed that book should take a look at this, destined, I am sure, to one day make some future Barnes' collection. For now, read and enjoy.
It is nice to see backlist titles continuing to get coverage. It leaves me hopeful -- a scarce commodity around here these days. Kerry Clare is currently reading Ray Smith's Century for her Canada Reads Independently program, and despite the fact that the novel opens with the ghost of Heinrich Himmler coming to Jane Seymour in the middle of the night, whispering endearments and stroking her exposed shoulder, a rather brutal and horrifying introduction, she seems "hooked, intrigued, confused and wonderfully searching." Which is exactly as it should be.
Mike Barnes's The Lily Pond continues to find new readers as well. He continued yesterday with a successful talk in Cobourg, one of more than a dozen he has given over the last year. Whether or not you have read his book -- and you should -- he has been posting sections from these talks, which can work either as an excellent introduction to The Lily Pond, or as supplementary reading, over at his blog. (The blog is titled 2009, because he didn't want to commit to a blog longer than the year. The fact that he has continued into the new calendar year is a very good thing.)
You can check out some of these talk segments at his blog -- www.graphomaniac.blogspot.com -- just go over and click Mike Barnes's name on the sidebar. Here is one of the more recent segments, "Know Thy Selves".
Know Thy Selves
“Know thyself.” Everyone has heard the ancient Greek injunction, inscribed in the forecourt of the Temple of Apollo at Delphi. For all its wisdom, though, I still think it could be improved. It presumes, in its singular pronoun, a stable and consistent identity, when in fact identity is malleable and multiple, a condition of flux which must be constantly updated, even renegotiated. “Know thy selves,” I humbly suggest, would be a more humane and practical credo.
Something I remained ignorant about for a long time, for example, was the fact that my periodic inability to read–words, these things I loved, going dead and blank, their sequences fuzzy and meaningless–is a common symptom of depression, and doesn’t at all betoken apathy or lack of intelligence. Or at least not permanent forms of those things. What it may mean, though, is a temporary impairment of interest and cognitive ability. And there are far better ways to deal with that than simply dropping out of the life one wants.
Like what? you may be thinking. What are you supposed to do if you find yourself bottoming out just when you need yourself most? Unable to read–but an exam coming up? Unable to write–but an essay due? I can think of some practical approaches to these problems, but outlining them would take us too far astray in a short talk. And I would be the last person to say that these are not serious problems, serious threats. Fluctations in mental health still threaten my job and my personal life; they’re a minefield I am always trying to pick my way through. I have no wish to travel back in time to advise my younger self: he did the best he could, what he had to do, then. But I know a couple of things he didn’t. One is that hiding a problem–from yourself and from others–usually takes more energy than trying to manage it. Coming out is almost always a good idea. What I hope I would do now, when I felt myself slipping, is to approach someone I trust with the facts: I want to do this (finish my course, write my exam, hang on till tomorrow), but for some reason I’m unable to. I need help, something to get me through this. That would be a start. Not a solution yet, but the only sure step I know towards finding one. I don’t say it is an easy step to take.
It seems strange that my eighteen months on a psychiatric ward in my early twenties had not begun my education in these matters. That tumultuous passage had schooled me in many miseries, fears and self-doubts of every kind, but it had not taken me very far at all in developing a practical awareness of myself, how I had changed, and how I might get on with my life, given the fluctuating and rather fragile (though at the same time newly toughened and robust) creature I now seemed to be.
Strange...or not so strange. Many medical mishaps–including a misdiagnosis of schizophrenia, zombiefying tranquilizers, many electroshock treatments and a near-fatal overdose–had given me good reasons to drop out of the standard curriculum of mental health. Again, though, I was an extremist: I shunned the mental health system completely for the next decade, which included some of the lowest and most pointless wandering in my life. Some kinds of learning occur only slowly, in tiny increments. No matter how successfully it is managed, trauma takes time. Time to occur (since it occurs in waves, even if one event precipitates it)...and a long time to come back from. Long, slow time is usually not on offer in an age that idolizes speed and a narrowly defined functioning. These idols of quick-time get stamped out crudely and worshipped thoughtlessly. And is it perhaps yourself–your image and expectations of yourself–that have helped to mold this unforgiving deity? Just because what you need isn’t on offer–or doesn’t appear to be–doesn’t mean you can’t ask for it, claim it. A system may function badly–many do–but it can’t function better than we ask it to. Demand it to. And: permit it to. “Time heals,” we say, but do we act as if we believe it? It takes courage to trust time–the courage to wait and see.
After that, of course, comes the challenge of admitting what you see, and finding room to accept it. Several times each year I still experience what I call my “shut-downs.” These are the periods that have taught me how far beyond sadness depression really goes. In these dead zones my brain and body and spirit–my whole self, really–become, in stages, unable to comprehend or respond to the world. It is a lot like that famous scene in 2001, when Dave Bowman unplugs HAL, and the computer disappears circuit by circuit–busted right down to his programmed origins of “Dai-sy...Dai-sy”–though by that time I have long since lost the urge to sing. At such times I’ve learned to apply what I call the small-circle cure. This means reducing activity and stimulation to a bare minimum. Dimming the lights, unplugging the phone, cancelling social engagements. And, as I feel my ability to think in sequence ebbing away, scaling my reading down from the love life of Anna Karenina to the love life of Britney Spears...and then further down, to just flipping through books of pictures or watching reruns of The Sopranos. To return to the idea of functioning: Someone seeing me lying on my side for hours beside a single lamp, flipping pages of Rolling Stone or People, might see a very low order of functioning...and it is, in a way...but it is a much higher order of functioning than I showed in the years when I tried to keep reading and writing through these spells, which can last six weeks or more, and added terrible frustration to depression when I could understand nothing, produce nothing. Self-acceptance, I’ve come to see, involves a better understanding of one of the simplest words: and. I am a person who reads, and writes, challenging books...and I am a person who, at times, cannot read or write the simplest sentence. The two facts are not mutually exclusive; they mustn’t be, since I’m living both of them.
But that little word and can be a terribly hard word to remember. A major part of my ongoing recovery, including the therapy I do with the excellent psychiatrist I have now, involves trying to remember the truth of and. As I said earlier, there is a degree of amnesia to my condition, so that every time I lurch upward into mania or downward into depression, it feels like the first time, and I lose all memory that I have been here before and gotten through it. Retaining a thin thread of memory, enough that I can say, “I know this place; I was here before, and I left again,” is one of the most important gains I’ve made in recent years. It’s a lifeline to cling to, a thread to guide me out of the labyrinth.
I learned all this again just last fall. Ironically, after my book launch in October, and at the talks I gave subsequently, some listeners said to me, “You seem well now,” as if all the troubles I was describing were safely behind me. “I do feel well,” I said, “...now.” But I could tell they didn’t believe me when I said I knew bad times would return, times they, and even I, could scarcely imagine. Sure enough, within a month, I was floundering, slipping into a netherworld of sleeplessness and incoherent thoughts and depression and even hallucinations. I could barely understand the book I myself had written or the talks I had given about it. But while I felt myself slipping, while I still had time, I did a useful, practical thing. Using what few verbal resources I had left, I wrote myself a letter, a sort of “message in a bottle” from my still-hanging-on self to the unwell self I felt gaining on him. I taped the letter to the wall beside my desk, it is still there, and read it often in the next two months, feeling disbelief but also comfort at its assurances that I had gone to this black place before and had returned from it. I wanted to read it as part of this talk, but it is a little too long. “Letter to Thursday” is a frank and simple statement from one self to another, saying in essence: I know you, even if you don’t remember me. We are in this together.
“In this together” is a sentiment alien to the depressed person, since a feeling of utter desertion is at the core of the predicament. One is abandoned by joy, by purpose, by energy...by others, by the world, by life...by oneself. The last is the harshest turning in the lock. Losing this first advisor, ally, friend–this best angel, truly–confirms that the ship has indeed been abandoned and must inevitably go down. Without this “other” there is no self–only a cave where someone used to live. Heaing no word is having no word. Getting a letter, a postcard, a murmur, on the other hand, is evidence that desertion may not be absolute, or at least not final, since somewhere your self-in-health is still speaking.
Mike Barnes's The Lily Pond is one of the books I'm most proud to have been a part of. It's also proved to be one of our more successful titles south of the border, even though we have not received as much publicity for it: it is a case of the importance of word-of-mouth, and how important it is for a writer to take an active role in the promotion of his or her work. In Mike's case, he has emailed and corresponded with countless readers, doctors, psychologists and others, conversations which have continued since the book was released close to a year ago now.
Unless you live under a rock, you're probably aware that Barack Obama is trying to pass health care legislation in the US, and that there has been a tremendous amount of acrimonious debate about it. In the process, our Canadian health care system, held up by some as a potential model for the US to follow, has come under attack by right-wing radio pundits and others opposed to Obama's health care plan. Some of Mike's US correspondents have asked him about his thoughts about the Canadian health care system, and if all of the horrible things they've been hearing are true. He's just posted a response on his excellent blog, 2009, which you can find here. He's titled it "An Anti-Horror Story." Here's the first few paragraphs:
Dear Jenny,
Thanks for your email. You say that down in Florida you're hearing horror stories about Canada's socialized medicine, which have got you more worried than ever about Obama's proposed health care reforms. You ask if I can shed any light on the matter.
I'll try. We hear the horror stories up here, too. In fact, most of us have told a few. Stories about long waits, bad doctors, wrong treatments, no treatment–all the ways a system can let you down just where you feel it the most: your health. They're like stories of bad car crashes or miscarriages of justice, with this difference: no one claims that privatized roads or courtrooms would eliminate those ills.
Come to think of it, I can't remember the last time I heard a Canadian suggest we abandon our public health care system in favour of a private one. Even those with a financial incentive usually advocate privatizing parts of the system; they want to tinker up their returns, not tear down the house. Everyone wants the system to work better, but they want it to work better, not be scrapped for another one that does not guarantee universal coverage.
Complaining is natural; everyone does it. When it comes to putting a bad spin on a good thing, Canadians take a back seat to nobody. Still, we need to balance the horror stories with other kinds of stories, just as true and happening every day. Call them anti-horror stories.
The following is an excellent talk given by Mike Barnes at the University of Toronto back in March. I've a lot of other things tied to the Lily Pond to put up -- including video of another excellent talk he gave at the Cobourg festival, and will do so as soon as I get a few minutes.
Over at Mike Barnes's blog www.graphomaniac.blogspot Mike will be posting over the next twenty or so days a long essay which might be understood as a continuation of his memoir The Lily Pond. I read an earlier version of this over the summer, though I've not yet read this new, edited version. I'm quite anxious, though, to read it, and will be checking in every day to read the installments as he puts them up.
I've taken the liberty of cutting and pasting Mike's introduction to this ideas of reference project below, and I'll be highlighting parts of it as he puts it up. But if you want to read the whole thing, I'd suggest bookmarking his blog. This will be worth tuning in regularly for.
Starting with the next post I will be entering a long, multi-part prose piece that, based on the draft I have, and if all goes well, should take between 15 and 20 days to correct and enter.
This writing has no title. Or rather its title is a picture, an image that repeats with variations at the start of each of the work's three sections. But because it is tedious to refer to an "untitled prose piece," I am calling it by its bracketed subtitle, (ideas of reference).
It also has no genre, or no definite one that I can see. It seems to loiter between personal essay and fiction, though sidling closer to the former.
I will number its three sections and parts in each post title, so that, for instance, (ideas of reference) 2.3 will refer to the third part of the second section.
What is it about? I don't know if that matters to you. (Especially since I don't know if there is a you. Disabling the Comments and Followers (Followers?!) functions was the first step I took in beginning this blog, a liberating act that I have never regretted and without which 2009 would have expired quickly.) But for some reason I feel the need to try and say.
If I found myself stretched on the Theme Rack in the English Teacher's donjon–that place of dank groans I have long since tunnelled out of, and which I do my humble and secretive best to help others endure and escape from–I might give up this to my inquisitors: (ideas of reference) grew out of my wondering at how one slips toward, and through, the door of insanity (to avoid some more sophisticated but cumbersome phrase such as "states of non-consensual reality"), and then, slipping through and back repeatedly, learns to channel those slipping passages as a source of art: writing as a lucid dream.
But that, barring screams, is all I could give those dear old thugs.
Below, information for this weekend's Cobourg Poetry Festival. Mike Barnes will be discussing his memoir The Lily Pond on Saturday afternoon, and Diane Kuprel and Marek Kubisa qill be doing a bi-lingual reading from their translation of Ryszard Kapuscinski's I Wrote Stone Saturday evening. On Sunday, I'll be there on a panel with fellow publishers Tim Inkster and Beth Follett on the state of the book.
POETRY'Z OWN WEEKEND Festival Thu Apr 16 - Sun Apr 19, 2009
With less than a month to go, Cobourg's inaugural 2009 POW! Festival - Poetry'z Own Weekend Festival - is moving into high gear. Some of Canada's finest poets are scheduled to read from their work over the 4-day event. POW! features poetry readings, lecture presentations, discussions exploring the world of poetry, a special session designed for kids, and a panel exploring the subject, "Whither the Book/Wither the Book.
Scheduled for April 17 thru 19, poets Mike Barnes, Jacqueline Larson, Paul Brown, Ted Amsden and Cobourg Poet Laureate Eric Winter are some of the poets signed up for the event. Professional actor David Calderisi will present the works of Robert Service, John Keats and Samuel Taylor Coleridege in an evening of recitation from memory.
POW! celebrates National Poetry Month across Canada. The municipal council of the Town of Cobourg has officially designated April 16 thru 19 as "Poetry Weekend in Cobourg."
Conceived by Cobourg poet James Pickersgill, the idea for the festival was inspired by an annual weekend festival held in Cobalt, Ontario. "If they can have a successful festival way up there," he thought, "why not in Cobourg?", a town that has become a sought after venue for out-of-town poets to read their work through the auspices of the Cobourg Poetry Workshop which holds monthly public readings of the work of local poets. Such a CPW evening will precede the festival on Thursday April 16 with poets Edward Carson, Carla Johnson and Grahame Woods presenting their work at "Meet At 66 King East," where the POW! Fesitval will be held in the inviting surroundings of a unique bistro overlooking Victoria Park and, beyond that, Lake Ontario.
"Many out-of-town poets and publishers already view Cobourg as a poetry place," Pickersgill noted, "but they will be convinced of that now that Town Council has declared POW's Thursday to Sunday as Poetry Weekend in Cobourg."
Admission to the 6 festival events is $6 each or a Weekend Pass can be purchased for $30.00. Admission to the 6.30 pm Opening Reception on Friday April 17 is $10 which includes a glass of wine and hors d'oeuvres. All tickets can be purchased by going to Meet at 66 King East, by phoning (905) 372-7616 or by emailing poetryzownweekend@sympatico.ca
Other poets in the full weekend line-up are: Carmine Starnino, JonArno Lawson, Art Cockerill, Linda Hutsell-Manning, JoEllen Bogart, Diana Kuprel, Marek Kubisa, Karen Dukes, Roz Bound, Marta Cooper, Oana Avasilichioaei and Ronna Bloom.
Other participants include Juno-nominated children's singer Eddie Douglas and 3 book publishers, Tim Inkster (Porcupine's Quill), Beth Follett (Pedlar Press) and Dan Wells (Biblioasis).
POW! acknowledges the support of the Canada Council for the Arts and the League of Canadian Poets.
More information on the internet: http://www.inkbottlepress.com/POW/pow_open.htm
Mike Barnes will be discussing The Lily Pond at the University of Toronto a week from Wednesday, at Hart House. If you've not yet attended one of his talks please do so, as they are among the best I've been part of. If you have, you know what I am talking about; but you should also know that each one is considerably different from those that precede it.
Here's an excerpt from his latest talk, in Waterloo last Thursday (which can be found on his blog):
About drugs I have only one thing to say. It is a very recent insight, but it offers a glimpse into a wealth of possibilities. It's not about drugs per se, but about dosage. Over the years, I've tried a huge spectrum of drugs–from phenothiazine tranquilizers to antidepressants to various mood stabilizers–but all of them, even the ones that seemed to help, had side effects I couldn't tolerate. So I've become very wary of drugs. My psychiatrist doesn't push them–"I'm here to advise; the decisions are yours," she says, which is one of the reasons I trust her–but she does sometimes suggest, especially when I get backed into a particularly bad corner, that there might be a drug that could help. Last fall, I got backed into such a corner and she suggested quetiapine (or Seroquel, its brand name). But when I tried it, at the lowest standard dosage of 25 mg, it zonked me out so thoroughly and for so long–the familiar "zombie" effect–that I realized I could not possibly function in any normal way on it. I cut the pills in half, then into quarters; though better, it still knocked me too far under. So I dropped the trial. But my doctor happened to mention that she knew a couple of people who were helped by extremely small doses of this drug. And then my wife's doctor said the same thing, that she'd heard of people who were aided by a mere "whiff," as she put it, of quetiapine. So my doctor wrote me a prescription for 1 mg–we would start from that baseline. The trouble came when I tried to fill the prescription at Shopper's, only to be told by the pharmacist, very insistently, that the lowest dose sold was the 25 mg tablet and it was unobtainable in 1 mg strength. "But that's the prescription my doctor wrote," I said, pointing at the slip. "You might try a compounding pharmacy," he muttered, then looked past me and said, "Next?" To make a long story short, in all of Toronto I found only two old-fashioned compounding pharmacies who could make up the prescription in the lower strength. I have been trying it for a few weeks now...it shows promise. But my point is (or rather, my two points are): 1) Cui bono? Who stands to gain if drugs are only sold in higher-strength amounts? You don't have to be a conspiracy theorist to see that drug companies would not want it widely advertised that minute portions of their brands might help some people. Would any drug seller want it known that some buyers got by on a "whiff" of his product? Would he want to pay for the tests to discover such a possibility? 2) Which of my many failed drug trials over the years might have stood a chance of success at a dosage of one half, one quarter...one sixteenth...of the normal range? A "tincture of this, a tincture of that," as the old saying went.
A bit of this...a bit of that. Even tiny pieces can have an important place in the mosaic.
“Alle Ding sind Gift und nichts ohn Gift; alein die Dosis macht das ein Ding kein Gift ist” [all things are poison and nothing is without poison; only the dose makes a thing not a poison]. Paracelsus's famous dictum usually receives a negative stress, i.e. Many things are poisonous except in small amounts. I have been reminded lately of its more positive face: Some things are beneficial precisely in small, even minuscule, amounts.
Over a Mike Barnes's blog (www.graphomaniac.com), Mike has posted a couple of links to a combined talk / slide show which are definitely worth checking out. They can be found here.
A review of the Lily Pond in the Guelph Mercury by Alex Good.
Mental illness has always been a difficult subject to relate to. The field is full of myths and common misunderstandings, making diagnosis and treatment both a bit of an art and a science. And so, if nothing else, a memoir of madness gives us a bit of insight into what may be going on.
In The Lily Pond, Toronto writer Mike Barnes offers a series of different perspectives on a life spent dealing with bipolar disorder. The book has four sections (Barnes calls them essays) that are arranged in roughly chronological order.
The first, which is also the shortest and most effective section, tells the story of the author's own early (mis) diagnoses, hospitalization, and search for a cure (including the usual laundry list of drugs and even electroconvulsive therapy). There is, however, no cure -- a point made at the end of the first section with a clever reversal of Zeno's paradox of Achilles and the tortoise. Just as Achilles can never catch the tortoise from behind, neither can he escape him if ahead. You can't shake depression.
And so, the next three sections describe Barnes living with his condition, focusing on his relationships with his family, his psychiatrist, and his wife. The presentation here is less personal, more layered with myth and metaphor and concerned with how experience is turned into the stuff of story.
But it remains compelling. Barnes, the author of highly regarded novels and short story collections whose sales figures (disarmingly documented here) are cause for depression enough in themselves, is a graceful yet economical writer with a knack for imagery you can almost feel.
Seeing his wife becoming cobwebbed in pills, he writes, "the image that comes to mind is of someone (I have done it many times myself) trying to secure a package that contains objects of irregular shapes and sharp edges, winding the plastic tape around it in fierce spirals, around and around, swathing and swathing until it lumpily muffled, sometimes (paranoia and fatigue combining clumsily) passing the dispenser over the name and address accidentally."
This is well observed and rendered, with the sentence itself wrapping round and round those bracketed digressions while suggesting the "fierce spiral" of illness and treatment swallowing the patient's identity seemingly by accident.
But The Lily Pond isn't just a portrait in misery. This is mainly due to the separation Barnes maintains between the autobiographical subject and the autobiographer, "the necessary sliver of space between my skin and what it was I was stitching." In other words, in the best postmodern fashion, this is a book that is also about its own writing, construction and interpretation. A portrait of the middle-aged bipolar man as an artist.
If there is one problem with the book, it is the final essay. This appears to have been almost an afterthought, telling the late-breaking story of Barnes' wife Heather's mental illness. The details, however, are sketchy, the imagery and mythic elements seem more forced and the picture we end with isn't as hopeful as it is disturbing.
Instead of mutual support, one has the sense of an unhealthy, mutually reinforcing codependency on a prescription of "twenty-nine pills a day."
On that regimen, the tortoise might even begin to close ground with Achilles.
Despite such final misgivings, The Lily Pond is an insightful look inside the black box of bipolar disorder and an original artistic reinterpretation of the experience of living with mental illness.
There is a fabulous interview with Mike Barnes over at the Danforth Review. The whole thing can be found here.
Here, however, is a taste:
Did you ever feel while writing this that the simple bare bones "non-fiction" element was too close to home? Did you fear it would trigger a negative outcome?
...Actually, it felt more like relief to concentrate on just my own story, understanding and telling it as well as I could, without the need to create characters and invent things for them to say and do.
At the same time, it felt, if anything, more deeply imagined (as opposed to invented) than fiction: there was a need to find the underlying patterns and structures that could link true events. But I guess you're asking more about personal risk. that was something I was not so aware of at the time–when I felt mostly exhilarated to be recovering the past–but have become very aware of since. More aware every day.
I think there have been, and will be, many negative outcomes for me from writing this book. They’re hard to name and harder to quantify, but I feel them, certainly. Writing names things, which can sound like taming them; but in another sense it gives them new substance and power: it bodies them forth. It’s daunting as well as strengthening to take the true dimensions of an enemy you've been battling...especially when there's no sign of an end to the battle.
At one point, when we were discussing the manuscript, my psychiatrist advised me to be cautious in dealing with what I had recalled. I quoted her (as best I remembered) for apiece I wrote about dealing with what I had written: "What you wrote may have unearthed a box. It may have been sealed for a reason...so you could keep functioning. Now it may be time to open it, or at least peek into it. Cautiously." This is the first time for me as a writer that the period after writing has proved far more difficult than the writing itself.
by Shane Neilson, from the Canadian Medical Association Journal
Memoirs of madness are now part of a tradition: There's AndrewSolomon's overrated The Noonday Demon; William Styron's excellentlittle squib Darkness Visible; and for a description of theutter nonsensical terrifying rhythms of psychosis nothing beatsMark Vonnegut's The Eden Express.
The best of these books (I have listed but a few) all grapplewith similar themes: the urge to kill oneself; the conundrumof whether the illness is in fact an illness or if it is partof one's psychological makeup and whether the illness is weddedto creativity; the journey to diagnosing the illness; and thestruggle to find the right drug, the right doctor, the rightmate. What distinguishes the best of these books — allrather grim itemizations of what a serious mental illness cando to the body and soul — is the quality of the writing.
Barnes' prose is spare, lyrical: a very mirror to desolation,to erasure. It is as if you are having coffee with a stranger,and he is telling his tale without self-pity or gloom. The telleris compelling not because of his experience of survival (thisis emphatically not a self-help, inspirational, or therapy book),but because of his assertion of the illness, his inhabitationof it and his portrayal of madness.
This illness is relentless and although Barnes does not do anythingso obvious, it can be likened to an implacable force of nature,pressingly present, incrementally receding, then massing offthe coast. This is assuredly a key factor in the value of thismemoir: if there were resentment at the cost of illness, we'dhave another whine book and the power of the tale would succumbto an undertow.
Outside of the first chapter, however, he is less self-absorbed;there are no flourishes, there is just purpose, and Barnes takesinterest in all the characters of his life. Memoirs can sometimeslose themselves at the exact location of their navels, and Barnes'self-knowledge prevents that, despite the occasional tinklingpiano key, like the too-pregnant set piece at the psychiatrist'soffice when Barnes is told he can recover: "It was a hard messageto hear in some ways. The tears that started to my eyes feltlike droplets of rain after a massive drought. Were they harbingersof the real downpour needed, or just a tantalizing sprinkle?"
And what of the outcome? Barnes is unsentimental about thiswhen he reflects on the occasion of a birthday party: "Thirty-threeyears lay between this late afternoon, slowly dimming now, poolingits shadows toward dusk...[u]nvanquishable, he must have seemed— and apparently still does sometimes, uncannily, somecore of myth intact despite the more than 3 decades of precipitousfalls and long slow climbs, slides and wily scale-backs, accordingto some persistence of family memory and personal meaning...."It is this mixed feeling, this summation of both bipolar disorderas what he has and what he has lost, that is the mythic coreof this book, the dualism, and hence its value.
Barnes is a star gazer, a wanderer of the imagination, and uncompromisinglyhonest with his own story. This is the real service he offersfor those looking for more than self-help: he offers self-definitionwithout romance or servile hope. Barnes considers himself bothadaptive and maladaptive. And you root for him as he seversthe self-image of illness, the switcheroo of the identity ofillness. At some point in all of the madness memoirs, stockmust be taken, house cleaned: The Lily Pond is that clearinghouse.One gets the double sense that Barnes, as he works out his ownillness' feints and predilections, is free as he never willbe free.
Another excellent post over at Mike Barnes's new blog. It can be found here, so why don't you go there now and favourite it: trust me, it'll be the most interesting and thoughtful new blog you're going to come across. In today's post, a post about blogging and writing and a poem penned near 30 years ago. Hallmark Barnes: layered collage coaxing connections not otherwise apparent.
For a taste, I'll pick one of his footnotes, or "speculative scatterings, the small change of spectral shakedown":
4. i produced "effects." and from the humblest of means: Hilroy notebooks, scraps of paper, pencils, Bic pens, a Smith-Corona manual typewriter that was thiry years old then. the mounting numbers of poems were dispersed around the world. batches of 10, outflow always exceeding inflow. if 7 "browns" (taffy-coloured 9-by-12 envelopes, addressed to me in my own hand) arrived in the morning mail, 8 or more went out that night. remixes of the better--on second look--of the 70 returns, augmented with new ones from the days since. 70 poems back, 80, 90, 100 poems out. those kinds of numbers are what once casued me to estimate, to bemused eyes in a writing classroom, that--crossing 1500-plus poems with the fact that some favourites went out at least ten times before being retired--i might have accounted for 10,000 poems passing in front of the eyes of others. 10,000 poem-perusals, however brief. and they also help to explain how the 125-or-so poems i eventually published in magazines could strike me as a relatively minor--if happy--effect i was producing. ("a Rocky of Verse" i styled myself: a nickname with mauled grandeur in its belittlement.) more immediate and more regular was the scowl my mailman gave me when i caught him loading the browns onto the flimsy wire claws beneath my lobby mailbox or, in protest, letting some of them drop to the floor. Jimi, too, my softheaded super who played ball hockey with his cats, i caught handling the browns, turning them back and forth in befuddlement before casting a (for him) sharply suspicious glance at his attic tenant. these were effects. so were the mailings and returns themselves. matter translated in the world. type on paper in envelopes in a truck or plane: carbon on carbon in carbon by carbon. was it bertrand russell who defined work as moving matter on or near the surface of the earth, or directing such movement? well, i was moving, and directing to be moved, a lot of matter. working from A to Z in the International Directory of Periodicals, i imagined fingers of all kinds handling my pages and responding to them with sighs, chuckles, curses, groans, frowns, smiles and, yes, silent wonder. i expected abuse, hoped for adulation. i received solid examples of the first and mild promises of the second. solid: a letterhead from a little mag with the macho boast: "Honest craft we salute, asswipe we so identify." my rejection was a blank page with "asswipe" circled raggedly. another tough-talking westerner--both of these Californian--scrawled "mostly this is SHIT." mild promises: acceptance, without comment, of a poem, the other 9 returned (i developed an uncanny ability to tell a "light brown" by heft). or (almost better in a way, more intimate): rejection with handwritten encouragement, "these weren't bad...send more." Poetry Australia accepted my poem synchronizing the life of Heinrich Himmler with the flowering of a hawthorn tree outside my window. a mag inEngland found "The Rabbit Screams" to be "hallucinatory, though needs shortening." a mess was being made. people all over the world were dealing with it. i was happy, involved. effects.
On November 2nd, Mike Barnes was the guest speaker at the St. Clement's 40 Minute Forum, and all indications are that it was, like every other Barnes / Lily Pond event this fall, a moving, powerful, and thought provoking presentation. Mike has since taped his discussion, which can be found here, at archives.org, where you can download it and listen to it at your leisure.
We're looking to set up some additional speaking engagements for Mike, so if you like his talk and would like to set something up, please get in touch. I can be reached at biblioasis@gmail.com.
An article by Ted Shaw on Mike Barnes The Lily Pond appeared in this morning's Windsor Star. Mike will be reading Saturday (tomorrow) November 1st at 1 pm at the Art Gallery of Windsor. For any area Windsor bibliophiles, I do hope that you will try and make it down.
The article:
For years, Mike Barnes would burn the midnight oil in a furious, almost desparate pursuit of art.
A poet and fiction writer, he mistakenly believed that he produced his best work during those manic episodes.
But 15 years ago, when he was in late 30s, Barnes discovered his experiences were much more serious and clinical than the romantic image he had created in his mind.
Barnes, 53, suffers from bipolar disorder, or as it was once known, manic depression. He has chronicled his harrowing experiences, and his efforts to make peace with himself and his family, in The Lily Pond: A Memoir of Madness, Memory, Myth and Metamorphosis, published by Windsor's Biblioasis Press.
Barnes will read from The Lily Pond and discuss the book Saturday at 1 p.m. at the 2008 BookFest Windsor at the Art Gallery of Windsor.
"For many years I did think that I could only write in my manic upswings," he said. "The depressive periods, pardon the expression, were pretty much a write-off."
His diagnosis when he was 38 followed years in and out of mental institutions, undergoing shock treatments, medication and clinical analysis. All the while, Barnes was a successful author with six works of poetry and fiction.
"It has just been in the last three years or so, since I've been seeing a new doctor, that she has encouraged me to start to question when I have those moments of inspiration."
His doctor suggested he write at times when he didn't feel inspired.
"The results were shocking," said Barnes. "I ended up writing less than before, but not that much less. And the really shocking part was what I ended up writing was just as good as the other stuff."
That experience occupies a key section of The Lily Pond, where Barnes describes how his 2006 book of poetry, A Thaw Foretold, also published by Biblioasis, came about.
"I realized just how much time was wasted in my periods of manic energy," he said.
The impetus for The Lily Pond came when Barnes' wife, Heather, also suffered a breakdown, and how they managed to survive takes up the final section of the book.
"It has been a struggle to get the word out about the book because people tend to categorize it as a bipolar book or a book about recovery," said Barnes.
"But one of the first reactions I had from someone who doesn't suffer from mental illness is that the book raises many issues that were more existential than psychiatric.
"It can apply to personal relationships, life stories, (and) to the choices you make in your life."
A short review has appeared in the important mental health magazine BP (Bipolar) Magazine, raving about Mike Barnes's The Lily Pond. As I have said elsewhere, repeatedly (sorry about that), I think this is one of the most important memoirs of its kind, better than Jamison, Styron, Solomon, Alvarez: most who have picked it up seem to agree. So, please, do so.
Here's the review:
The Lily Pond: A Memoir of Madness, Memory, Myth and Metamorphosis By Mike Barnes (Biblioasis, 2008)
Reviewed by Rachel Bravmann
In 2008, memoirs about bipolar disorder are flying off the shelves. Barnes’ personal chronicle rises to the top due not only to content but to his sheer mastery of language.
Exploring 30 years of living with bipolar disorder from a variety of perspectives, including in-patient hospitalization, he weaves a complex narrative of memory and pondering. From descriptions of depression to the natural world and even mythology, Barnes commands a natural affinity for exposition and depiction. Take notice of his relationship to a nursery web spider, a wood frog, his family, and his partner, Heather, who also lives with mental illness. These bonds are beautifully illustrated, venerated, and illuminated.
In describing Heather, Barnes may also be describing the nature of bipolar disorder: “Mental Illness–meaning here, the diagnosis and treatment of it especially–is working against her confidence, implanting radical doubts in her about her basic capability.” In doing so he creates an essential element of trust with readers. Full of fraught childhood reminisces, explanations of the excruciating and familiar ebb and flow of despair, and complex existential tracts, The Lily Pond shines.
Though we launched Mike Barnes's memoir The Lily Pond: A Memoir of Madness, Memory, Myth and Metamorphosis last Thursday in Hamilton, Ontario at St. Joseph's Hospital, the Toronto launch is this Wednesday, October 15th at Caversham Booksellers (7:00-8:30) {98 Harbord St.}. Though I will not be able to attend this one, I urge every single one of you who can to do so. I think that Mike's memoir is an important book: as I've said elsewhere, having a tendency to wallow in the dark waters from time to time, I've read a lot of these books, and I think this is among the best. Better than Styron, better than Jamison, both of which are defaced by the self-congratulatory notes of overcoming which mar so many of these tomes. In the Lily Pond one gets a sense of a life lived with mental illness: "the door swings both ways," Mike writes, and depending upon which side of the door one finds oneself, this can be either hopeful or horrifying, extremes captured with elegant restraint in this book.
Shane Neilson, doctor and poet, made the trek from Guelph for the Hamilton event, and reported on it thereafter on his blog. I'll paste it in below here in the hope that it will convince a few of you to make this reading. Mike was fabulous. It was, without a doubt, one of the best talks/readings I HAVE EVER BEEN TO, and he'll be giving a similar discussion at this one. Mike deserves an audience for this one, and I'm hoping that any of you Toronto area Biblioasis-o-philes who give a shit will make this one, if you don't make another until 2010. Please.
Here's Shane Neilson's take on Barnes's launch in Hamilton last Thursday. I'll post my own thoughts and photos, as promised, soon.
A lifelong project: mental illness, over thirty-five years of it. Mike Barnes, the author of The Lily Pond, read tonight at St. Joseph’s Hospital in Hamilton, a place he had been a resident of, long ago, and this was no mere reading. I detest readings, I would rather read the book in question myself to myself, I find that readers read their books wrong, but Barnes prepared an actual presentation: sure, he read from his book, but he also expanded upon the themes of his book as he simultaneously compressed the themes of his book through supplementary anecdote and musing. It helped that he had what Heaney termed Lowell’s command: this is a survivor of mental illness, but not in the victimized sense; this is a man that has come through, but who questions what he has come through and what he is coming into; this is a writer who is perpetually writing precarious dispatches, but who is granted repose; this is a writer who steadfastly refuses the romanticism of madness, who attests to the dead zones of his life, who can refer to entire stretches as “pointless.” Barnes was eloquent, it was as if he had assembled all the outtakes of his book of memoir-essays and weaved them together for his audience that night. I say command: Barnes had the room, utterly. He possessed us for an hour. And then released us.
One became aware something remarkable was happening when, at the beginning of the evening, Barnes’ publisher actually wept when introducing the author; it was clear that the publisher had his allegiances, and they were for his writer, and he was protective of this writer, and respectful of this writer, but moreso simply moved by the power of this writer, and not by the mere power of Barnes’ example, which as the evening progressed was undeniable; no, the publisher believed in the actual writing, it was the harrowing lyricism and questing metaphors and difficult questions that provoked this response in the publisher, and I must confess it was the emotional template for the evening. I think of the usual glad-handling and puffery at such events. This was very different. Barnes' avowed honesty was contagious.
When Barnes spoke, I felt tumult; it was as if I were being confronted with the very fact of mental illness, its diminishments and levelling; at points I thought it was less like Barnes was speaking and the illness was speaking instead. This might have been more chilling if Barnes wasn’t so matter-of-fact; though the illness was stark, the insight and self-knowledge gained as a result tempered the extremity.
So much of memoir nowadays is about the author’s navel; in Barnes’ story, there are other people, Barnes has a fundamental curiosity about other people; I think this is, more than the myth and memory of the book’s subtitle, the real engine of his recovery. And reviewers are always attesting to the courageousness of the memoir writer when the writer is unflattering towards the subject, when the writer portrays themselves as bumbling or mistaken; I’m not sure Barnes could be called courageous or even resilient, because what choice did he have? He’s here; he has a story to tell; the story is compelling. But I imagine that in the room the illness was there, that it fretted about which seat to take before it decided to sit down next to the publisher, who seemed sympathetic, and it paid very close attention to Barnes. And that Barnes seemed to know it was there, and that this was normal, and that Barnes had done a lot of withstanding, and transcending, and the illness had done a lot of witnessing, too. Not exactly colleagues; not exactly at ease with one another; not enemies; but brought together in the same room, though a door that Barnes memorably describes in his book. I’ll leave that for you to open.
Barnes admitted that there was a conversation going on in Canada about mental illness, and that he wanted to be a part of it. The Lily Pond is a considered manic statement; and though I said I would not admit that Barnes is courageous, and I still think what matters is the writing, not the surviving, I will admit that returning to St. Joseph’s, a place where he was almost a nullity, a frail patient, has to represent some kind of courage.
The title of your new memoir is The Lily Pond: A Memoir of Madness, Memory, Myth and Metamorphosis. I wonder if you could start by explaining this a bit, with perhaps particular emphasis paid to your rather interesting subtitle?
For a few months the manuscript had another title, and only three sections instead of four. I thought it was finished. When I was surprised by the events, and then the writing, of the last section, I realized that its title, "The Lily Pond", had to be the title of the whole book, since it encapsulates so many of the themes and images explored throughout. But a book just called "The Lily Pond" could be mistaken for a manual on aquatic gardening or a study of Monet--hence the subtitle. It came from me asking myself a simple question: What is the book about? What are its main and recurrent elements? It's about madness, an old-fashioned term which I usually prefer to the more modern "bipolar disorder". Madness covers a huge range of extreme states: from craziness/mental illness to fiery creative passion to overmastering love and obsession. I think this scope makes it a more humane term, but also a more accurate one. The book is also about memory. This might be considered redundant: isn't a memoir by definition about memory? No. All memoirs draw on memory, but this one actively explores how memory may be lost or damaged (through illness and its treatments), how and to what extent it may be recovered, and how a coherent life story may be maintained even in the absence of reliable memory. The book is also about myth(s). It draws on world mythologies to make some of its points, but in a broader sense, it questions the daily myths of illness and wellness by which we know ourselves and others. How do these myths damage, limit, nourish, reveal? Can they be changed? Lastly, it is a story of metamorphosis: of altered states wrought by illness and confusion, but also by recovery and understanding. It is about the paradox of accepting radical ongoing transformation as the foundation of life and sanity.
Plus, I like the alliteration of those five "M"s. They sound like murmuring.
I like your use of madness as well. It seems more fitting, human, less clinical. Madness' shape more diaphanous, perhaps, than bi-polar or schizophrenic, more human. More true to life. There's nothing contained about it. It also seems to me that this is a book, in some ways, you have been working toward for quite a while. Your other books -- some of your stories, your poetry, perhaps most especially your first novel, The Syllabus -- have grappled with the subjects of madness, of memory (and forgetting), of metamorphosis. Especially M., the hero of The Syllabus. You describe memory in The Lily Pond as a Turner fogscape. Can you briefly explain?
Well, that comparison comes specifically from "Two Rooms", the first section of the book, where the period I am trying to remember is the eighteen months I spent on and off (mostly on) a psychiatric ward...when accurate recall was swamped by a perfect storm of memory disruptors: multiple electroshock treatments, phenothiazines and other powerful drugs, and the confusions and distortions of psychosis itself. So the snippets that come back to me are often like those tantalizing gleams in Turner's veils of fog. Sometimes, if I concentrate, more details will come and the object or face, a scene, will solidify and make more sense. And this also happens looking at Turner's paintings. This doesn't mean, though, that the glimpses of things could be anything, are random. I have a sense--a memory trace, I assume--of what is really there, and it has weight, a "rightness" on those occasions when I find it. For example, a year ago, my sister told me of visiting me in the hospital at a time when I was catatonic, just lying on my bed unmoving day after day. And fleeting images of her then came back to me, bits of her face, hands, the hospital wall behind her...and I trusted these. Partly because they had that weight I'm speaking of, a mass that felt like more than fancy...pieces actually dredged up from something sunken...but also because they stayed as bits, fleeting fragments. I think a wish-fulfillment fantasy would have bloomed more completely. This was one of the worst times, memory-wise. Nearly obliterative for those years, but also very destructive of my life up till then, as if a retroactive fog had swallowed much of the past. And then the memory troubles continued forward too, with fog and "gap-outs", as I call them, especially during times of illness. In recent years I have felt much clearer and more certain about remembering my life. Relatively speaking; when I compare notes with other people, they express surprise at how places I've been, books I've read, etc. could vanish so completely. But I've learned a lot of tricks that help: checks and double-checks, ways of reinforcement, and also habits of concentration and reflection to lay down and maintain a stronger memory track. And I've learned to live with the holes. Turner's fog can be unsettling, disquieting...but it also has its gentle and allusive aspect, a richness of suggestion. Whereas easy-to-see could also mean easy-to-dismiss, which is another kind of forgetting. I'm sorry: you asked for "briefly" and this hasn't been. Memory is a raw nerve.
Can you say a few words about the writing of the book?
The story of the book's genesis is told in the book's third section, "Leavetaking", where, with the help of a gifted psychiatrist, I follow, in an almost detective-like fashion, a number of mysterious clues and events that lead me to an answer which is also a course of action:telling my own story, this memoir, for the first time.
One of the key precipitating events, described in the book, was being asked to speak about my life as a writer for a university group.In preparing that talk, I realized that I had not told, even to myself, my own story—or this important aspect of it—in explicit and detailed terms.In my poems and fiction I had alluded to it constantly and tried to illuminate it from various angles.But I had never consciously tried to explore at length, in writing, the meaning for me of my decades of mental illness.This preliminary thinking led me into areas of exploration that were unusable for a short talk to a few strangers but which proved to be the beginnings of this manuscript.
After writing the first three-quarters of it, I sent it to five friends, less to get their judgement on its literary merits than to see if it spoke to them as a "human" story they could relate to.Their enthusiastic and encouraging responses led me to continue the project, eventually writing the last section about my wife's recently-diagnosed illness and, in slow steps, to consider and finally say yes to Dan Wells's offer to publish the book.
The current issue of Q&Q has a review of Mike Barnes's just released memoir of 30 years of bi-polar disorder, The Lily Pond. It's a thoughtful review by Mark Callanan, someone I'd expect no less of. I've not yet seen the new Q&Q yet, having let me subscription lapse, though a thoughtful person, knowing it would warm my heart, sent it along last eve. So I'll copy it below.
I think this book by Mike an important and brave one. Having a tendency to wallow in the dark waters a touch myself, I've read a lot of these memoirs, and I think it ranks up there with the best of them. This is more Styron than Jamieson, offering no pat solutions or self-congratulatory survivalisms; it is, as Callanan points out, as much as anything an act of recollection, reconstruction, remembering. It's a memoir about memory as much as anything else: despite appearances to the contrary, most are not. It is about the proverbial power of art, the narrative-life-line of mythology.
This spring, when we were putting the finishing editorial touches on The Lily Pond, we received word through our sales manager that if we changed the title to include a direct reference to bi-polar disorder we might be able to swing the all-important table placement at Indigo. I talked this over with mike, who, though leaving it to me, made a very strong case why we should not do so; he'd rather, he argued, stick to the more diaphanous concept of madness. It's a more human, less clinical term. Madness, with all of its varied associations, positive and negative, more closely and humanely captures a life lived with mental illness, with its consequences for the sufferer, the ones who care for him, and those he cares for.
So though The Lily Pond may not be facing you on a table when you enter the local Indigo, it will be on the bookshelves there, and on any other bookstore shelf worthy of the name. So, please, go search it out. In a season that seems swamped with memoirs and novels dealing with bi-polar disorder and mental illness, I think this will be one of the most affecting and important.
The Q&Q review:
Though "oblivion, and states approaching it" may, as Mike Barnes writes in the first of four lengthy essays that make up The Lily Pond, "slide away most determinedly from the very conscious act of writing," they can be apprehended by those diligent (or obsessive) enough to attempt to capture them.Barnes's own protracted state of near-oblivion–some 30 years of fighting bipolar affective disorder, originally misdiagnosed as schizophrenia–is the subject of this, his seventh book.
Barnes, a novelist and short story writer as well as a poet, is adept at moving between the purely narrative–the what and how of his own mental decline (which includes, among other low points, a particularly gruesome suicide attempt)–and the intense imagery of his prose, which is both poetically compelling and evocative of the physical world.The neuroleptic drug Mellaril, for instance, makes his arms swell up into "clubs.Bland bats: long, smooth, round, heavy."Pulling his jeans over swollen thighs means "pushing as if at cart wheels stuck in mud."
Famous artworks provide another means for Barnes to express the workings of his mind.A deeply depressive state is a Turner painting "with walls of solid-seeming whitish or grayish vapor shifting sluggishly, and only the vaguest hint here and there...of what might be a bridge, boat, sun."The "implacable" hunters of Brueghel's Hunters in the Snow embody the author's own figurative trek.Likewise, the numerous underworld narratives of Greek myth inform Barnes's struggle against oblivion–they are a powerful current that runs, like the river Styx, throughout this memoir.
Given Barnes's "general amnesia"–likely the cumulative effect of electroconvulsive therapy, years of debilitating drug courses, and mental illness–The Lily Pond is the ultimate act of recollection.Barnes has imposed continuity on the fragments of his life, and done so in a way that is neither over-determined nor self-satisfied.Perhaps his greatest feat of perception is in recognizing that his struggle is ongoing: he has not been plucked from the underworld river; he has simply discovered–by torturous process of trial and error–how to tread water.
Mike Barnes's 2006 collection of poetry A Thaw Foretold has been reviewed on the McNally Robinson blog, as well as on Todd Swift's UK site EYEWEAR. It's a good, thoughtful review, and one of the few, unfortunately, this damn fine book has received. It's also one of our most beautifully produced, the cover letter pressed on a St. Armand handmade stock. And one of our scarcest to boot, as Canada Post destroyed at least half of the print run in transit. But there are still copies available, either on the website, directly, through amazon, indigo, or via special order through your favourite independent.
Here's a brief quote from the review:
The poems in the collection don’t all fit perfectly but most do, engaging and challenging in equal measure, many of the poems demanding a second and further readings, bringing the reader back time and again to flick through the pages and join the poet on his journey through shared emotional seasons.
Mike Barnes's latest book, The Lily Pond: A Memoir of Madness, Memory, Myth and Metamorphosis, is in the final stages of production. A memoir of his more than thirty year battle with bi-polar disorder, it's one of the most intelligent, moving, beautiful, and horrifying treatments of mental illness I've read (having a tendency to wallow in the dark waters myself from time to time, I've read a lot of them). You'll be hearing a lot more about The Lily Pond, here and elsewhere, as the launch date approaches.
Sometime in 2007, fellow Biblioasis writer Mike Barnes sent me, in
manuscript, an essay he’d just written called “Two Rooms”, asking for my
response. From the first paragraph, I found it electrifying, astonishing,
and (remarkably) strangely beautiful despite its harrowing subject matter. It
described his hospitalization, in his early twenties, following a bizarre
self-mutilation, and what came after: misdiagnosis, two years of failed drug
trials, electroshock treatments, a staff meeting that nearly saw him
transferred to a long term care facility; then months of near-coma resulting
from a prescription dosage error. “Two Rooms” was the genesis of The Lily Pond: A Memoir of Madness, Memory, Myth and Metamorphosis (Biblioasis,
2008), a series of four interlocking personal essays that probe the impact of
mental illness on a life over a period of thirty years.
